According to a report put out by Greenpeace in April, the electricity demand of data centers and the telecommunications network is rivaling that of most nations. If the cloud were itself a country, it would rank fifth in the world on energy demand behind the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan.

There is no doubt that data centers require a tremendous amount of energy to run, and the demand for electricity is only likely only to grow. If data centers draw on traditional energy sources such as fossil fuels, advocates like Greenpeace predict disastrous consequences for greenhouse emissions and climate change.

Yet the reality is that data centers are essential — not just to tech businesses but to any organization that uses the internet to operate (that covers nearly all of them, doesn’t it?). Some of the large IT companies have begun to use their power and influence to change the energy landscape. Google has invested almost $1 billion directly in renewable energy. Facebook has chosen to locate at least one of its data centers near renewable energy sources. eBay has pushed for legislative change that enables companies to access renewable energy directly.

Here is more information on what two of the tech giants are doing, and what companies of any size can do to reduce their share of cloud’s environmental impact and save money.

The Solutions

eBay: The online retailer built its first data center in 2010 (it had previously leased data center space, which is what many in the industry do) in South Jordan, Utah. The center was built to LEED Gold standards. It was a nearly perfect location, in a favorable climate and within 14 milliseconds of the company’s future Arizona site “Nine out of the ten things were solved in Utah. But renewable energy wasn’t,” said Dean Nelson, eBay’s senior director of Global Foundation Services. eBay wanted to use renewable energy to power much of the facility for both environmental and economic reasons. But there was a problem: Utah law didn’t allow non-utility companies to buy and transmit power directly from renewable energy developers.

eBay, together with Data Center Pulse, an association of data center professionals that Nelson founded before he joined the company, worked to change the law. The company collaborated with Republican State Senator Mark Madsen to form a working group that consisted of other energy end users, Utah’s largest electric utility, renewable energy producers and consumer groups. The working group drafted legislation that was passed by the state legislature in March. As of this summer consumers in Utah can purchase renewable energy directly from suppliers.

At the same time the company was partnering with policymakers in Utah, it was also looking for solutions that would take some of its data centers off the grid entirely. Last week, eBay announced plans to expand the South Jordan facility and to use renewable energy as the primary power source for the new portion of the site. It will be powered by six on-site fuel cells, and the electric utility grid will only be used as back-up.

eBay will be the first tech giant to use alternative power as the primary source of energy for a data center, and the company is rightly receiving accolades for this move — even Greenpeace praised the announcement. The company recognizes that given the capacity demands it will need to continue using both off-site solutions, such as the Utah law allows, and on-site ones, like the fuel cells.

For eBay this is only one piece of the pie. “We’re looking holistically at all aspects of the data center — the costs, the locations, and the efficiencies,” Nelson said. “Our approach is to solve the problem in our own backyard first and then take it from there.” eBay closely documented the building of its Arizona site, called Project Mercury, and created a case study sharing its specs and specifics on how the company achieved them.

One thing that sets eBay apart in this area is how closely aligned facilities and IT are. Usually, two different executives run these functions. But when it comes to the data centers, Nelson pays the power bill and buys the hardware. This means that the company considers things like how they’ll cool their servers at the time of purchase, not later on when it’s too late.

Nelson advises small and medium companies to leverage the investments larger businesses have made to prove that alternative approaches are possible. “We all face the same problems, it’s just a difference of scale. It’s still about efficiency, it’s still about flexibility and agility,” he said. He encourages them to challenge the operators of the data centers in which they lease space and the manufacturers of the servers they purchase to meet higher efficiency standards.

Facebook: Facebook currently has two completed data center facilities — one in Prineville, Oregon and the other in Forest City, North Carolina — and has begun building a third in Lulea, Sweden. The company has been lauded for choosing a location in Sweden, a country known for its stable power grid and strong mix of renewable energy. “Choosing where to site a data center is like finding a needle a haystack. Sweden is starting to look like a needle — a perfect site,” said Michael Kirkland, communications manager at Facebook.

Kirkland characterizes the company’s approach to making their data centers energy efficient as “vanity-free”. The company looked at everything that went into the data center — the building, the servers, the cooling system — and designed it to be bare bones. “Everything that wasn’t directly related to doing useful work, we stripped out,” he said.

“Most servers that you would buy off the shelf will have a nice plastic bezel on the front. You put your logo on there so when you walk your CEO past it, he or she is really impressed. We got rid of that. It was six pounds of plastic per server that we didn’t have to buy, install, and wouldn’t go into the waste stream when we decommissioned the servers,” Kirkland said. Turns out those bezels also hindered a server’s energy efficiency because it blocked air from coming in and the fan in the back had to work harder to cool it.

This vanity-free approach has worked for Facebook. “The Prineville data center uses 38% less energy to do the same work as the facilities Facebook was leasing in 2011, while costing 24% less,” said Kirkland. In 2011, Facebook started a project called Open Compute to help other companies achieve similar efficiencies. “We wanted to answer a bigger question: How do you approach this in a responsible way as a broader community? We sat down and finalized the designs [for the Prineville center] in early 2011, and then we made the unusual step of open sourcing them,” he said. Traditionally, the industry has been very closed about designs for servers and the other components that go into data centers. Facebook wanted to have a larger aggregate impact by building an open source movement and encouraging others in the industry — especially manufacturers — to follow their vanity-free approach. “The way the industry has functioned to date is on a gratuitous differentiation model. Ultimately what that leads to is a lot of inefficiency and a lot of waste. We wanted to shift away from that,” he said.

Kirkland advises companies to advocate for and demand vanity-free technologies from suppliers. “A consolidation of voices in the consumer base coming together and saying we want vanity-free, we want highly scalable, energy efficient. That’s what’s helping shift the supply base,” he said.

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